In a typical wireless network, one or more wireless devices are associated with a common wireless access point, which may be connected to a wired network. Communication between wireless devices is through the access point. Such operation is known as the infrastructure operating mode.
Adoption of Wi-Fi technology is increasing in all market segments. Traditional usage scenarios made use of an access point as an intermediary node for communication between two wireless devices. However, usage scenarios have developed where Wi-Fi devices need to communicate directly with each other without going through an intermediate device such as an access point. These scenarios are commonly called P2P (point-to-point) based scenarios. For P2P scenarios to be usable, issues associated with discoverability, pairing and invocation of services should be resolved, while maintaining minimal power consumption.